So an easy way is to use an el-get recipe: M-x el-get-install ropemacs. It installs and build Pymacs, rope and ropemacs. The difference from the solution using pip is that it setups the Emacs side of Pymacs correctly.

make check ensures the prerequisites. sudo make install puts Pymacs module in Python local modules path, usually /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/. People generally frown upon make install, because if you lose the Makefile, it can become hard to cleanly uninstall. But you shouldn't fear it, as pip uses the same directory, so pip uninstall pymacs will work.

After you do the make install of pymacs do not delete the folder.Copy the file pymacs.el to ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/

Traad is a client-server approach to using the rope Python refactory library. It involves two basic components:

A HTTP server exposing the rope API via JSON, and

Client libraries for talking to the server

Since rope is written in Python, any tool that wants to use rope needs to either embed Python, or it needs to find a way to communicate with a Python process running rope. The embedding approach is difficult if the target environment is not written in Python, and it also faces challenges when dealing with more than one Python version.

So traad aims to simplify communication with rope running in an independent process. HTTP communication and JSON data handling is well supported in many, many languages, so any environment that wants to use rope should be able to easily communicate with traad.

Jedi.el is a Python auto-completion package for Emacs. It aims at helping your Python coding in a non-destructive way. It also helps you to find information about Python objects, such as docstring, function arguments and code location.

Etags (Exuberant Ctags) generates an index (or tag) file of language objects found in source files that allows these items to be quickly and easily located by a text editor or other utility. A tag signifies a language object for which an index entry is available (or, alternatively, the index entry created for that object). Etags is a multilingual implementation of ctags.

The primary use for the tags files is looking up class/method/function/constant/etc declaration/definitions. Cscope is more powerful (see below).

cscope is a much more powerful beast. While it operates on more or less the same principle (generating a file of useful metadata) it allows you do some fancier things like find all references to a symbol, see where a function is being invoked, etc.+ (you can find definitions as well).

It was originally designed for C and C++, but thanks to version 0.3 of pycscope, pythonistas can make use of it.

When done, you can either enable the mode with cscope-minor-mode (which will add a menu you are free to explore) or call some functions like M-x cscope-find-global-definition, M-x cscope-find-functions-calling-this-function, etc.

Eldoc is a MinorMode which shows you, in the echo area, the argument list of the function call you are currently writing. It works out of the box for elisp editing and for modes that implement its support, such as python-mode. You just have to call eldoc-mode.

Some tools allow to apply the changes of virtual environment activation inside emacs. They make M-x compile aware of the environment, etc.

virtualenvwrapper emulates much of the functionnality of virtualenvwrapper, integrates well with M-x shell or eshell, is aware of hooks, has an automatic activation by project and integrates in the mode line.